1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a color image processing apparatus, and more particularly to an apparatus capable of reproducing a color image of high quality.
2. Related Background Art
Full color copying machines have been widely used in recent years. With such full color copying machines, a color original is digitally read through color separation to supply the obtained color data to a color printer mounted within the machine, whereat a full color copy of the original is printed using yellow, magenta, cyan and black four coloring materials.
There are many color originals which contain black character areas. It has been required for a half tone area within a color original to have multi-tones, and for a character and line image to have a high resolution.
There have been proposed various methods of completely separating a character and line image area and a half tone area which are subjected to proper signal processings to reproduce them with high fidelity.
However, in practice, it is difficult to completely separate only a black character signal and print it with only black coloring material. Therefore, black characters have been printed to some degree with other yellow, magenta, cyan coloring materials so that color bleeding occurs, resulting in poor quality of black characters and the like. The present applicant and same assignee have proposed U.S. Pat. No. 4,700,399 and U.S. application Ser. No. 173,654 to improve character quality, which are incorporated herein for reference.